Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The retired space shuttle Discovery took its final flight atop the back of the modified Boeing 747 that has moved to the shuttle between locations over the decades. NASA loaded Discovery on the back of the 747 earlier this week in preparation for its flight to Washington where it will spend the remainder of its days.

You might have had a peaceful day here, but up above, some serious solar violence just went down: an ejection of scorching plasma just erupted from the Sun. Enough to burn its away across ten Earths.

The eruption is what's known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, when the Sun's magnetic fields force out an unfathomably large amount of unfathomably hot gas: "A large CME can contain a billion tons of matter that can be accelerated to several million miles per hour in a spectacular explosion.

The United Nations Security Council and HP are investigating how HP computers and servers managed to get into the country of North Korea, despite extremely high-profile restrictions on electronics exports into the communist dictatorship. The UN has enforced a sanction against shipping any such materials to North Korea, and HP also has a corporate policy that prohibits any of its equipment from going into the country’s borders.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Figuring that I moved into my first apartment in Sophomore year of college, I guess you could say that I’m in year 17 of buying my own light bulbs. And when I really think about the money I have invested to literally light up my life, I can’t say that any significant figures come to mind. Tack on 3 more years and I’d say I will have spent a total of….oh I don’t know…$100 total on light bulbs.

There are so many ways I could go about describing this. For instance, I could say things like “MirrorBook Air: Where vanity meets technology.” Or perhaps I could go with “Nothing says ‘I’m a douche’ more than pulling a pocket mirror out of the back pocket of your bootcut True Religion Jeans…no wait, pulling a pocket mirror that looks like a MacBook is way worse,

If your abode has ever been touched by the space-saving hand of IKEA, you'll be familiar with its clever, wallet-friendly wares. Now, the Swedish furniture giant is bringing its quirky ideas into the technology market. Frustrated with cable spaghetti ruining the otherwise sharp lines of its TV storage units, the Scandinavian firm has taken it one step further, and built the TV right in to the furniture.

In incredibly creepy fashion, Tupac Shakur returned from the dead as a hologram last night to perform “Hail Mary” and “Amerikaz Most Wanted” with Snoop Dogg and Dr.Dre. Now fans of Tupac will know that he never performed Hail Mary live in his lifetime. The incredible footage was created by splicing together existing performances to create an entirely new sequence.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has warned of “very powerful forces” looking to undermine the openness of the internet, echoing Eric Schmidt’s concerns and admitting he is “more worried” than ever before. There are “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world” Brin told the Guardian, describing the situation as “scary.” He didn’t hold back on dishing out blame, either, citing Facebook and Apple as building walled gardens that do users – and rivals – a disservice.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, there are two movies in the works about his life. Sony is working on the big-budget production based on the autobiography of Jobs published very shortly after his death. The second film is an independent project with Ashton Kutcher playing Jobs. What we didn’t know when the picture was first announced was when it would be released and what specific timeframe the movie would be looking at.

In the latest battle in the war for living room domination, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings took to his public Facebook account and called out Comcast’s latest attack on Net Neutrality. As he explains Comcast’s just-launched Xbox 360 Xfinity app does not count against the provider’s ISP data caps. However, if the same exact program is viewed through Hulu, HBO Go and, yes, Netflix, it deducts the data used against the subscribers monthly allotment.

If you think Twitter is annoying, just think how much worse it would be if you could hear it. Well, now you can. A new microblogging site has taken the concept of Twitter, and added sound. It's called TweetVox, though already some are calling it "Witter". It was launched in London and Paris last week, and, as with any internet craze, world domination is planned, with launches scheduled for Spain and Japan.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.

With the days getting longer and the spring sun creeping into the evening hours this week, we saw a host of impressive solar energy projects that put those rays to work. Kyocera revealed their plan for Japan's largest solar farm and French company Areva announced they will be building the largest solar installation in Asia.

You might not have noticed it if your Apple sensor is as normalized as your love for great advertising, but billboards, bus stations, and print ads across the United States have finally switched from iPad 2 to the new iPad for 2012. Have a peek back at our report on when the states were still sticking with iPad 2advertisements to see the oddity the vast majority of the USA didn’t find necessary to notice, then take a peek at a few of the new ads up this week. They’ve been up for a couple weeks, actually, everywhere from Minneapolis all the way down to San Francisco!

Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Pebble smart watch – a clever little device that connects to your iPhone or Android device and, oddly enough, tells the time – was a twinkle in the eye of founder Eric Migicovsky just a few weeks ago. Now the product has reached $2 million in funding. And if that weren’t enough, InPulse, the company that makes the Pebble, only ever asked for $100,000 over the course of the entire project.

Valve has confirmed that it is doing its own research into wearable computing, joining a club that includes Google’s Project Glass and Nokia R&D, though the company has warned not to expect a commercial product any time soon. Managing director Michael Abrash revealed his pet project this week, researching the future of hardware and software for wearable, “Terminator vision” style devices that could possibly be a direction Valve might follow.

Whether you intend to flip through your favorite pages, surf the web seamlessly or watch interesting videos, the innovative iPad lets you do just about everything. But if you want a physical keyboard experience strung along, disappointments are what pour in. Probably with an intention to provide you with an external keyboard as well, iHome recently strengthened its rich portfolio of accessories with the latest iDM5 tablet dock.

You don’t often read the words RIM and “good news” in the same sentence any more, unless there’s a “no” or a “not” in between somewhere, but the gang in Waterloo can justify some high-fives following Trend Micro’s latest report on mobile operating system security. According to Trend, BlackBerry 7 is the most secure of the big four OSes.

It’s going to be showcased at NAB very soon, but the sexily-named Eizo FDH3601 is very likely only going to be picked up by professionals with a specific need for the prowesses it achieves. It’s a 4k display, meaning it sports a resolution of 4,096 x 2,160 pixels. That’s the equivalent of four 1080p displays in one 36.4 inch frame.

A surprising number of the gadgets and technologies we have today are on the verge of extinction. Laptop Mag's Avram Piltch walks us through more than a dozen, knowing that his newborn son will be about as familiar with them as today's teens are with Betamax. And some of this batch might surprise you.

From the moment that I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child, a son, I've thought of his development in terms of tech.